Interview with Mark W. Johnson on Lead From The Future -- The Business of Government Hour

Well, I think a visionary leader is one... I can tie it more readily with the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, I think a visionary leader is able to see past today and in the next number of years and look to a hopeful future, one that can create inspiration for an organization or a country or society by being able to make it as clear-eyed as possible. More than a vision statement, as we often talk about in the corporate world, this is really a clear-eyed view of what could be the best possible future based on looking out more than just a couple of years. Five to ten years is what we prescribe to be able to bring that future alive. You could actually look to the future and talk about what's happening in that future and how you can put yourself in that future. We like to use the analogy of Wayne Gretzky, the famous hockey player: it's about skating not just to where the puck is going but being able to shape where the puck should go. To me, that's a visionary leader who's able to come up with that clear-eyed view of the future and how you fit in that future, and then of course inspire others to be part of that journey.

Just to make it really simple, strategy is about winning the game; vision is about what is the right game. Strategy is about operationalizing a vision, executing it, the competitive piece—how do you win and actually achieve what you're intending to do. The vision is about this new game, but it also needs to be filled with purpose and inspiration. It's what gets the organization inspired to continue over the long term, even in the midst of difficult days like what we're dealing with with the crisis, whereas strategy is more about the mechanics of how you achieve the inspiration that you set for the organization.

The whole concept of disruptive theory is about how incumbent organizations and institutions continue to develop products and services and do their activities, and they continue those with an assumption that their existing business and organization just gets extended out in time indefinitely by continuing to make improvements to it. Where the disruption comes in is sometimes you leave the customer behind or you leave society behind in this onward and upward march. The example was mainframe computers back in the 80s. They were continuing to march forward with mainframe computers for corporations, but yet Apple and Compaq and other personal computer manufacturers came in with something that was a whole different paradigm shift. It was something that was much cheaper than a $500,000 mainframe computer, sold to consumers and to secondary schools, and it provided access to a whole set of what we'd call non-consumers. All of a sudden they had computing power in their hands in the late 70s and early 80s. The Digital Equipment Corporations, Prime, Wang, and Nixdorf companies that made mainframe computers just kept extending out their minicomputer business. They kept doing what was called sustaining innovations, and they never embraced how personal computers created this whole new paradigm that disrupted and redefined the trajectory of computing power in the world. As personal computers got better and better, they literally disrupted these mainframe manufacturers. That's the essence of disruption: how do you create products, goods, and services that enable a larger population of people that would normally not have access because they didn't have the financial means or the skills to be able to do that?

Oh, he was huge, Michael. In fact, I paid tribute to him. As many of your audience might know, he passed away in January, and we had been together for nearly 25 years, not only as a colleague who helped change me professionally but also personally. His thinking, back to this whole point about disruptive innovation, was really a theory that predicted things about how the world would work, how innovation and growth not just in businesses but in government and the military and so forth could be determined in terms of making progress for the benefit of society and for the benefit of business. I tribute the book to him as a visionary because it was his theory of disruption which I think is the whole point of being able to look ahead and make good decisions based on what good theory tells you, like disruptive theory. My intent of the book was to say, well, you have this theory of disruption, how do you bring that theory and innovation perspective to the challenges of leadership and organizations? That's when I over these years have put this together: the biggest challenge is getting leaders across the board—again, not just in government but in nonprofits, in the military, and even religious institutions—to embrace a longer-term planning horizon and to be more forward-looking as the enablement of exercising a theory like disruption theory.

Yeah, well, I think we could all agree, especially with the aid of information technology, we become more productive, but we've also become busier. So the tyranny of the present, the tyranny of the urgent, is there's so much what we call operate and execute before you. There are so many different budget reviews, so many different operational plans to review, and we're just overwhelmed in meetings. I've talked about a Harvard Business Review article by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria in 2018 that said the average CEO is in 37 meetings per week, which takes up 72% of their time. It's just crowding out the ability to think in a future-back way, meaning what if? What's the art of the possible? What does the future and being more forward-looking reveal in terms of how things might change or how things might need to be planned for? How do we begin to build contingencies? All those kinds of things are crowded out by the higher and higher intensity of the here and now. So when you combine the tyranny of the urgent or the present with these biases and incentives, the only antidote we talk about is the cavalry's not coming. The way to break free of that is to literally change behavior. We say before changing your mind, make the choice to carve out 10%, maybe up to 20%, of leadership time to looking out into the 5 to 10 year horizon and what could and should be beyond the way things work today. Make that time commitment and do it in the sense of dialogue and an exploratory type conversation rather than the typical operate, execute, analyze, and make decision type conversation. So you've got to break free by carving out the time, and if you need to delegate to do it, you need to do that. But that's the critical number one choice that leaders need to make: are they willing to plant vision and long-term planning alongside the tyranny of the present and all the things that come at us, and bring that future alive through embracing a way to become a practical visionary as we've been talking about?

Well, the first part of future-back is the thinking part of it, before the process piece. It's being able to, in your mind, make a clean break from the way things are in the past. An example of this, I think maybe in government, would be instead of traditional budgeting incrementing off of last year's budget, it's zero-based budgeting. It's clean sheet. It's a design thinking mindset which says we're going to architect something new, even if we ultimately are incorporating part of what we do in the future. What is what we're doing today, but we need to start with this sort of zero-based budgeting mindset, imagine that future in the right level of clarity, and then you walk back. If that's what we need to look like in 2030, what do we need to have in place in terms of systems and capabilities and actual businesses or groups of operations in 2028? And if that's what we have in 2028, what do we need in 2026? So you're working it from right to left, you're working it from future back. What you're building through that process of walking it back is a roadmap, but you're doing it backwards. You're developing a set of milestones, but you've done it backwards, and it ultimately leads all the way to the present in terms of what a leader does, which is to allocate resources and make choices. So you would define what we call a growth and innovation portfolio of the kinds of investments of people's time and dollars and even leadership bandwidth to the kinds of things to continue to support and invest in the way things work today, but also what are you planting seeds for the future based on having looked in the future the right way and walked it back to the present.

I think there's a way that leadership teams, kind of like how departments can be really well organized in process and activities and a lot of structure. We find a lot of leadership teams don't have as much of that structure. So if we really want to institutionalize this and make it a way of working and really change behavior, in the later chapter in our book we call it the leadership framework, where you literally can lay out what does it mean as a leadership team when you're in that 80 to 90 percent of present-forward? What's the focus of leadership? What are the processes employed? And then what are the decision-making milestones or metrics? So present-forward, the example would be we lay this out graphically: present-forward versus future-back, toggling between them. Near-term, of course, in operations execution oriented, it's going to be a very ordered and analytical process about get the data, make decisions. It's going to be very fact-based and financial, and that should just be explicit. 'Okay, we're in present-forward mode, and this is how we do things, and we understand our circumstance and our way of working and decision making.' In future-back, we make it explicit and we say, lay out all of a sudden we put a different hat on. We sit down in a round table, so to speak, because we want to make sure it's egalitarian in doing this. We're going to be long-term, and we're changing our mindset from operate and execute to be more about exploration and envisioning and discovery. So we're going to have a different thinking mode. Our processes are going to be more organic and iterative and creative. It's not going to be this sort of same regimented type; it's going to be more like an innovation team type of process. And the decision-making again is not going to be as much on financials but on assumptions and learning milestones and proving or disproving assumptions as you work through initiatives. We think putting a framework like that in place and being explicit at it, and then saying what's the cadence of how often we spend time and for how long in the future-back mode along with the majority of our time in present-forward, is a way to give this ability to have real structure and to infuse future-back thinking as a permanent way of doing things in addition to present-forward into these leadership teams.

I absolutely think it can go to government agencies because what an agency needs to do is to be able to serve the citizens of the United States and serve local populace. The ability to be able to look ahead and anticipate what is going to be the best way to serve its people, especially as things become different in terms of how they can be served with the enablement of technology, digital transformation, what it can do, how societal preferences change—they as much have a reason to be forward-looking as any corporate CEO. The military absolutely. We think about when 9/11 and asymmetric warfare really became very clear, it was hard for the military to change course. You're not going to change the complexity of organizations and some of those biases and incentives we talked about, but it can change with behavior. It can change with this notion that leadership with vision can be made consummately practical, that you can start developing a way of thinking and for people to have conversations about the five to ten or longer horizon, and entrust that by having repeated conversations, insights will come, and those insights will create opportunities for action that wouldn't have been on the radar screen had you not done it. Again, I think government agencies are just as much about a set of people who are trying to serve a customer as any business, and the same kind of process can be beneficial to them.